Leftists Push Obama as Reagan

Jan 27, 2011

RUSH: State-Controlled Media right in there trying to draw comparisons between Ronaldus Magnus and Barack Obama. On MSNBC this morning, Morning Joe, they talked to the managing editor at TIME Magazine, Richard Stengel, because the latest cover of TIME is a Photoshopped Reagan with his arm around Obama. And Stengel was asked to explain this.

STENGEL: The cover is, Why Obama Loves Reagan. It’s a Photoshopped image of the two men together. They never actually met, but I’d like to think they’d have a good time if they were sitting down at the White House together and it’s basically how Obama from even the 1980s started looking at Reagan as a transformational politician —

RUSH: Oh, come on, man.

STENGEL: — not in terms of substance, but in terms of style —

RUSH: Come on.

STENGEL: — with someone he would model himself after, and that has happened over the last 20 years.

RUSH: I’m not gonna read it to you again, but we’ve read countless times from Obama’s book about how he hated Reagan and his minions. In fact, one of Obama’s stated reasons for wanting power was to do away with what Reagan had accomplished. All of this is lies, patented lies. What is this, ‘I’d like to think they would have a good time if they were sitting down at the White House’? Okay, so TIME Magazine, big whoop, TIME Magazine used to be something. TIME Magazine is not anywhere near as influential or powerful or present as it used to be in this era of New Media. Maybe 20 years ago, 30 years ago being editor of TIME was something special, like there was a time where if you had a gig on ABC, CBS, or NBC, it was special ’cause there were only three of them. If you had a sports gig, if you had a political commentator gig, you were the anchor on one of the three nightly newscasts you were huge because there were only three of you out of the entire world population. Now they’re a dime a dozen, and it’s the same thing with editors at print publications, be they magazines, blogs, newspapers, or what have you. They’re all over the place.

So 30 years ago, 25 years ago it mighta mattered when the editor of TIME said, ‘I’d like to think they’d have a good time if they were sitting down in the White House together.’ But now it’s who cares what you think and why do you even think it? Reagan had nothing in common with Obama. They play these games, if JFK were alive today, if Martin Luther King were alive today. If Reagan were alive today watching all this, for crying out loud, folks, he’d wished he’d had Alzheimer’s so he wouldn’t be aware of what’s going on and see what’s been done to his legacy and the great work that he did as president.

How do you leftists feel about this? I know that you all hate Reagan, you have despised Reagan. Even during the Reagan administration the number one objective of the left has been to revise Reagan history. I mean all this talk about Reagan cutting taxes for the rich, didn’t care about the poor, didn’t care about AIDS, didn’t care about the homeless. Reagan was a cold-hearted, mean-spirited extremist. And these are the people, the ones that have been saying it all these years. And now all of a sudden when their little guy gets in trouble, when Obama can’t get any traction whatsoever, when he’s lost the love, when he’s lost all of this messianic stuff that attached itself to him, where do they go? Do they go to JFK and try to draw analysis and comparison? No. They go to LBJ? No. They go to Jimmy Carter? No. They’d probably love to go to Marx. They don’t dare. They go to Gorbachev? No. They go to Mao Tse-tung? Only in private. Who they gonna go to, Reagan, all to draw this illusion that their president, young guy, this man-child is moving to the center? In the next breath, though, listen to this, this is Richard Stengel. Scarborough said, ‘Well, we’ve been saying for some time, even in bad times for Obama, it was 2010 for Reagan, it was 1982, even as the numbers go down, still personally very popular.’

STENGEL: A lot of parallels. Reagan obviously lost both houses in that midterm election. His popularity went down to 35%. But the economy in Reagan’s case came back that next year, came back at 7% GDP growth. If Obama gets half of that, he’s lucky. But the other difference is, I mean there are a lot of similarities but one difference is you always knew where Ronald Reagan stood. I mean for 25 years he was talking about government is the problem, not the solution. And Obama doesn’t quite have that same clear through line that Reagan has. And he’s trying to get that. You can’t say the opposite of that, that government is the solution, not the problem. And in the story, he talks about how there needed to be a correction to the Reagan correction. And that’s what he’s trying to do.

RUSH: Okay. So these people despise Reagan, now they’re trying to make Obama the next Reagan, and in the next breath Stengel admits Obama wants to reverse Reagan. Truth comes out. But you know Obama is never gonna say, as Reagan did in his inaugural address, that government is the problem, not the solution. I don’t care however long Obama lives, he could live to 110 years old, he’s never going to say that. Let’s listen to a little bit of Reagan, shall we? And then you draw the side by side, A-B comparison. January 11th, 1989, the Ronaldus Magnus farewell address to the nation, warned us of people like Obama.

REAGAN: Are we doing a good enough job teaching our children what America is and what she represents in the long history of the world? Those of us who are over 35 or so years of age grew up in a different America. We were taught very directly what it means to be an American. And we absorbed almost in the air a love of country and an appreciation of its institutions. If you didn’t get these things from your family, you got them from the neighborhood, from the father down the street who fought in Korea, or the family who lost someone at Anzio, or you can get a sense of patriotism from school. And if all else failed, you could get a sense of patriotism from the popular culture, the movies celebrated democratic values and implicitly reinforced the idea that America was special. TV was like that, too, through the mid-sixties.

RUSH: So you could clearly see, this is 1989, Reagan could see back then we were losing our sense of history and American exceptionalism and essentially warning us about the emergence of people like Obama and the things that he believes. Patriotism is mocked today. Patriotism is laughed at and made fun of. It’s considered camp. True enlightenment is to think your country is guilty, true enlightenment today, pop culture, wherever you want to go, Democrat Party, true enlightenment is America is guilty. True enlightenment is America has transgressed; America must make amends; America must apologize. We have a leader who does apologize for the country. These people have a big task to try to convince this country that Barack Hussein Obama equals Ronald Reagan. Now, there may have been a day that they could get away with it, some years ago. But not now. From the same speech, the farewell address, January 11th, 1989.

REAGAN: Now we’re about to enter the nineties and some things have changed. Younger parents aren’t sure that an un-ambivalent appreciation of America is the right thing to teach modern children. And as for those who create the popular culture, well grounded patriotism is no longer the style.

RUSH: Yep.

REAGAN: Our spirit is back, but we haven’t reinstitutionalized it. We’ve got to do a better job of getting across that America is freedom — freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of enterprise, and freedom is special and rare. It’s fragile; it needs protection.

RUSH: Damn right. And I don’t think too many people on the left would high-five any of this, spirit’s back. We don’t want our spirit to be back, the left wants us to be down and out, down in the dumps, mad, how unfair and how unequal, how sad things are in this guilty country. And Reagan called it, ’89, for those who create the popular culture, well grounded patriotism is no longer in style. Certainly isn’t. One more bite from that farewell address, January 11th, 1989.

REAGAN: We’ve got to teach history based not on what’s in fashion, but what’s important. Why the Pilgrims came here, who Jimmy Doolittle was, and what those 30 seconds over Tokyo meant. You know, four years ago on the 40th anniversary of D-day, I read a letter from a young woman writing to her late father, who had fought on Omaha Beach. Her name was Lisa Zanatta Henn, and she said, ‘We will always remember. We will never forget what the boys of Normandy did.’ Well, let’s help her keep her word. If we forget what we did, we won’t know who we are. I’m warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit.

RUSH: It’s underway. He warned us. In 1989 Reagan was warning us of exactly what we’ve got, and not just in Obama but the Democrat Party at large. And yet here comes TIME Magazine and the rest of the Drive-By Media trying to tell us, and Obama himself trying to tell us that he’s Reagan. Out of all the presidents, as he prepared for this latest State of the Union debacle, of all the presidents, it was Reagan that he studied. Well, we know what he really thinks about Reagan. He’s told us in his books: resentment, dislike. They think Reagan destroyed America. They think Reagan set up this situation here where the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, the widening gap between rich and poor, the unfairness, the inequality. Reagan was the epitome of heartlessness, had no compassion or whatever. But this just goes to show that when Democrats need to look back to history, when this regime, when the media, the American left needs to look back to history to try to connect with the majority of people in this country, they have to go to one of the greatest Republican presidents of all time and try to pull it off.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Chris in New Hampshire, I’m glad you waited. You’re next on the EIB Network, sir, hello.

CALLER: Yes, hey, Rush, live free or die dittos from Mark Steyn’s EIB Northern Command state of New Hampshire.

RUSH: Thank you, sir, very much.

CALLER: Last week there was a story that circulated a bit about some violence at a Walmart in Washington. There were some shootings involved, and I’m wondering if you thought that Target’s violent marketing rhetoric with bull’s-eyes on everything might have had any influence on that if that outbreak of department store violence might —

RUSH: Actually, no. If that were true, people would be firing at Target. I mean the Target logo is on Target stores.

CALLER: That’s true, but it does create an atmosphere, if you will, kind of a shopping climate —

RUSH: Well, except now, nobody’s shooting Target stores. They’re shooting Walmarts. So you can’t look at Target. We looked it up. We found some anti-Walmart rhetoric from the New York Times. Frank Rich just routinely rips into Walmart. The left frequently rips into Walmart. What do they do? They destroy mom and pop grocery stores and department stores. They destroy Main Street. They destroy unions. They don’t pay health care. I mean the left is ginned up all kinds of hatred at Walmart, and, in fact, in Washington the union was urged to go out and protest on the lawn, on the street in front of the Walmart executive’s house, and it was after that happened that the shooting incident at a Walmart in Seattle took place. So I mean you do the math.

CALLER: Yeah, I suppose you’re right there. One other comment, if I have a moment, the situation with Obama trying to be portrayed as the new Ronald Maximus, I’m thinking that if you listen to the clip you played a while ago, it’s the influence Ronald Reagan had that he’s trying to emulate. They were very careful to distance him from the content, just the style he’s interested in, so I think —

RUSH: Well, not entirely. I mean I know what you’re saying, but not entirely. There were parts of that State of the Union speech, in fact, the deadest parts where he was trying to sound like Reagan. And I’m convinced the reason that he sounded dead was because he can’t fake it. He really doesn’t believe that stuff. Not too many people can fake passion. I mean actors can do it, but not too many people could really bring off genuine passion when they don’t feel it for something, and I think that’s one of the problems that Obama had.